The Saint Steps In (The Saint Series) by Charteris Leslie

Author:Charteris, Leslie [Charteris, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

3

He took the report on Calvin Gray first, since it was the shortest. And it only amplified with dates and places the kind of picture which he had sketched by then for himself.

Old New England family. Graduated from Harvard, magna cum laude. Member of the faculty of Middlebury College, five years. Married: one daughter, Madeline, later B.Sc. at Columbia. Wife died in childbirth. Member of the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, nine years. Then a professorship at Harvard for six years. Inherited California gold mine at death of father. Check, check, and check. Retired, and devoted himself to private research. Author of one book, Molecular Principles of Chemical Synthesis, and sundry contributions to scientific journals. No political affiliation. A quiet modest man, well-liked by the few people who got to know him.

Nothing much more than could have been found in Who’s Who, if Calvin Gray had ever bothered to seek an entry there. But enough to confirm the Saint’s information and his own final estimate.

He turned next to Walter Devan. He had recalled a few associations of that name since their meeting, and he found them verified and extended.

Born in a small town in Indiana, father a carpenter. Ran away to Chicago at sixteen. Newsboy, Postal Telegraph messenger, dishwasher, car washer. A few preliminary bouts as fall guy for rising middleweights. Professional football. A broken leg. Garage mechanic, night school. Machinist in an automobile factory in Detroit. Repair man in the Quenco plant at Cincinnati. Repair foreman. Then, in a series of rapid promotions, engineering manager, assistant plant superintendent at Mobile, personnel manager for the entire organisation of the Quennel Chemical Corporation.

And that was where the biography became quite interesting, for Walter Devan’s conception of personnel management, which apparently had the approval of Quenco to the extent of raising his salary to an eventual high of $26,000 a year, was something new even in that comparatively youthful industry. He was credited with having become the field commander of Quennel’s long and bitter fight against unionism, a miniature civil war which had only been ended by congressional legislation. He had been accused in a Senate investigation of instituting an elaborate system of spies and stool-pigeons, of coercing employees with threats and blackmail, of saying that any union organisers caught on Quenco’s property would be qualified for a free funeral at the corporation’s expense. Certainly he had more than once imported regiments of strike-breakers, and been the generalissimo of pitched battles in which several lives had been lost. But he had easily cleared himself of one indictment for manslaughter, and the blackest mark on his legal record was an order to cease and desist. Entrenched behind his own taciturnity and protected by all the power of Quenco, he had become a semi-mythical bogey man, an intermittent subject for attacks by such writers as Westbrook Pegler, a name that the average public remembered without being quite sure why, but even if the papers in Simon’s hands only collated facts and rumours which

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